The Portrait Read Online Free

something, one day, it would not be what was intended.
    A few days later, I was dragged back from the gates of hell. Don’t ask me how. Creator was asked whether he would like to paint Cindy. Yes, that’s the one, the wife of Fokke Ponsen, of Procter Poldermol, with whom she would soon be celebrating their first anniversary. Once again that year, Ponsen had made it into the top ten of the Dutch rich list.
    Cindy was the first facelifted person that Creator would paint.
    During the first interview, when specifying the details of the commission, he tried to approach her like anyone else — but he kept getting the feeling, as he told Lidewij afterwards, that if he accepted Cindy he would not be painting from life . With her corrected mouth, her accentuated nostrils, her pulled-back cheeks, and her smoothed frown, it was, he said, as if Cindy was already a portrait. He was not happy about it at all, because he had already accepted the job; or, at least, he hadn’t rejected it, such that it would be very awkward for him to turn it down now.
    And damaging, he said, at this stage.
    He meant: Now that Aunt Drea really is headed for a nursing home and we — if we want to buy Withernot — need to make as much money as we possibly can.
    In moments like these, he always said ‘we’.
    It seemed to me that the interview with Minke was still preying on his mind, and he kept thinking of her question — whether he got sick to death of all these blasé characters.
    And then, suddenly, in Lidewij’s presence, he made a decision and swore. I don’t mean that he swore to do something. He started swearing and pulled me away from the wall, lifted me up by the cross at my back, turned me around, and carried me over to the easel. Lidewij was standing there and he asked her to hold me for a moment. Then he adjusted the easel so that I could stand on it, with my bottom at his knee height.
    You’re serious, Lidewij said.
    I was standing on the easel for the first time in my life. But I felt faint at heart.
    Creator shrugged. Why not?
    Someone like Cindy on that canvas … you must be joking, Lidewij said.
    Someone like Cindy is perfect, Creator said. She’s fascinating, if you really look at her. Fascinatingly mask-like.
    He knew he was lying, and that made him more and more convinced that he was doing the right thing.
    Cindy Ponsen from head to toe — that’s cutting edge, he said.
    I noticed that he hadn’t looked at me for a single second, as if I already had eyes for him to look away from. All I saw was how small and nondescript he was. With me upright like this, his shoulders only came up to my middle.
    Lidewij looked at me. I remembered the apple-green shoes, to which I now added her chestnut eyes. She reached out with one hand and stroked my linen with her fingertips.
    Why so cynical? It’s not like you.
    They went for a walk through the woods around Withernot, and for the first time I was able to look out into the world at my leisure, which is to say through the sliding doors and into the garden. I was still trembling from the unutterable menace I had faced, but also from the feathery touch of Lidewij’s fingertips. For a moment, it had seemed to me as if she had turned my linen into human skin.
    It was early November. I know that because, while looking around the studio, I discovered a calendar on a side wall, hanging next to Jeanine, who was always just on the point of not sliding her hand away from the left side of her face.
    Lidewij, in particular, had often looked at the calendar, at the picture of the month. They had bought it in Rome, where they had spent a week together just before my arrival, and liked it so much they hung it up early. I have never been close enough to see exactly what they show, those pictures, but I have gathered that they are reproductions of paintings from the Vatican Museum. I remember that months later, in March, I could clearly make out